New worlds: Man-made islands reshape the coast - Page 2

Palm Deira, Dubai

Launched in 2003, the Palm Deira is the final part of the trilogy. It is 7.5 times bigger than The Palm Jumeirah and five times bigger than The Palm Jebel Ali. Until recently considered the world’s largest man-made island, it will be dwarfed by the new Waterfront project in Dubai.

With 41 fronds, the island will have a surface area of 46.35 million square meters that will be formed using 1.14 billion cubic meters of sand.



Nakheel expects the island to be a city within a city, hosting more than one million people and offering them a balanced mix of luxury and boutique hotels, villas, residential apartments, private beaches and marinas, resorts, and a commercial hub. The Palm Deira will also host a science museum, library, schools, a hospital and clinics, post offices, religious amenities and other service facilities.

Currently, no news is available on the percentage of reclamation reached by The Palm Deira, but full reclamation is expected to be achieved by 2013. It will then take several years after that for construction to be completed.

Dubai Waterfront

The Dubai Waterfront islands will be some 300 hectares bigger than the Palm Deira. Made up of six islands plus reclaimed land on the coastline of Dubai’s mainland, it is a huge project that will consist of a number of cities.



Land reclamation has begun on the islands themselves, which swing around one side of the Palm Jebel Ali, looking a little like a scorpion’s tail. Ignoring the land-based element of the project, the islands are 2,300 hectares of land reclamation, a distance of 30km tip to tip. Land reclamation is taking pace at a speed of 3.5million cubic metres a month; the first island at the time of writing was 60% complete, the second 20% and the others at a lesser stage of development. All should be finished by 2012-13, but the whole project is likely to take 20 years.

Around 400,000 people will live on the islands. They are designed to be low density compared to the rest of the Waterfront development, where the majority of the 1.5 million people will live.

The World, Dubai

Following the publicity The Palm achieved, HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai, said he wanted an island development embracing the whole world, just 4km off the coast of Dubai.

The World is a 300-island project, developed by Nakheel over a space of 931 hectares in the Persian Gulf. Work on the project started in 2004 and reclamation was completed in January, when the final rock in the breakwater was laid.



Creating 300 islands required 320 million cubic meters of sand and that was sucked up from the sea and pumped into the surface to shape the islands. Again, the islands themselves are made up of only sand, which is vibrated to ensure that it is highly compacted, which in turn are protected by the rock breakwater. The 27 km-breakwater, made from 32 million tonnes of rock, protects the islands from environmental and weather changes.

The whole process for making the islands required perfect master planning to maintain the islands as the owners will be terraforming or earth-shaping their own islands later on. To this end, Nakheel created a canal system that acts as the navigational network of The World, as well as the ‘skeleton’ that gives the development its world map.

With prices ranging between $15m to $50m per island, half of The World has been sold – although Nakheel will not reveal owners unless they make themselves known, although it said that 10% of owners are celebrities. Buying an island is through invitation only and they have to submit their development plans for building, which are subject to approval before work can proceed.

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